This week's LWN looks at Get New Hot Stuff in KDE 4. Improvements currently being made by lead developer
Josef Spillner include new options for uninstalling content, content synchronisation, the ability to rate content directly from the application interface, a dramatically faster interface and more. Get Hot New Stuff is now a specification on freedesktop.org and used throughout KDE in apps like Amarok and KOrganizer.

"Content providers can offer automatic synchronization by listing references to files on a network rather than the files themselves. When the application attempts to access this quasi-installed content, it will have to fetch it from the server using KIO rather than a local directory. In this way, the content will always appear up to date to the user."

What *would* be cool is if you could publish the entire set of your KDE program configurations to a server (minus personal things like email/im addresses), and let people download and try them out. I'd love to browse people's *personal* configurations online. (Does that make me sound like a voyeur?).

KDE has so many settings that can be tweaked, and I enjoy seeing how other people have their systems configured when I go to events like aKademy.

If these settings include a diff from the default settings, they could have an even greater impact.

But if they need specific programs, plugins and similar to work, publishing your config that way could require deep integration into the distribution you use.

It might have to install plugins and programs (or prompt the user), and it might have to remember which ones it installed, so they can be deinstalled when you switch to another preconfig (or the user can be prompted to deinstall them).

I couldn't agree more! Every time I read "Hot new stuff" I literally cringe. It's not that the name itself is bad, it's just horrible inconsistent. When I look at the Kmenu and see the handy descriptions of applications I don't see "new fangled text editor" for Kate or "where you're spam is held" for Kmail. KDE has always used easy to understand, no nonsense language. "Hot new stuff," on the other hand, is totally culturally dependent (I wonder how it translates in other languages) and fails to mesh seamlessly with the rest of KDE's consistent use of language.

The only time the user actually sees "Get Hot New Stuff" is after they've opened the GHNS window in an application. Like in Amarok the button that opens the GHNS window is called "Get More Scripts" and "Download Styles". People aren't going to be manually running the GHNS independent of any other application from the KMenu, so they'll only see the name after they're already into it.

I'm no translation expert but I'd figure it wouldn't be too hard to translate and localize the name into other languages (I'm sure most languages have equivalents for 'hot' or 'neat' or 'cool' or 'awesome' as well as 'stuff').

Also GHNS isn't a description, its a name that doesn't make people think 'named by a computer'.

You should not have to translate the name of an app. Amarok is the same in every language, so does KDE. An app or a service should have a short name. It does not really matter if it's understood or not (nobody has issue with "word" or "itunes"), as it is a name for most people. But Get Hot New Stuff is not a name and is thus more complicated for people who do not speak english. Besides, it sounds like a bad commercial. :-)
Hé here's a name ! Kommercial! :-D
(OK, just joking....)

Get Hot New Stuff isn't an application, it is a technology applications like Amarok can use, and the only real user visible time you would see the name is in the title bar for the GHNS window after you explicitly opened it from the application. Consider it closer to the file selection dialog than an application.

"Get hot new stuff" is as good a name as "Open file." As far as anyone should be concerned, they are both features and should have easy-to-understand names. Though it could be a bit less childish...maybe "Download add-on's" or such...

But that's not a problem of the Name, but a problem of the english language: It simply has not enough pronounciation rules.
For me, as an austrian, it is rather simple:
Amarok is spelled: A - ma (the "a" and "ma" like in "mamma" - not like in "a" or "apple") - rok (like "rock")

This is good Linux tradition: You know how to spell "Linux", especially the "i" and the "u"? :p Even Linus Torvalds had to make it clear how to spell it right (hint: do never spell it "English", German spelling is quite next to his spelling).

For me (as a German) Amarok is as easy as Linux, and I never had any problems with Kivio and the infamous K of KDE is in many places inspired from German (which does have more K's than English, thanks to the orthography reform of 1901, previous to that it used as many "C"s as English).

But on the other hand in German you often have troubles with "strange" English names. For example our lovely text editor "Kate". It is a English girl name but in German you spell it different and it even has a different meaning although it is not used very much in today's German (a "Kate" is a lowly farmhouse where animals and humans are living under one roof).

My personal objection out of these language troubles are:
a) Do not use English names. They often create the biggest confusion cause they are often intended to mean everything and nothing at the same time (thanks to the "international" character).
b) If you want something exotic look at some small languages for cute words and create a nice story around your name. That way everybody has to learn about it first. No way to let people think "Ah I know everything I don't need to read the explanation".
b) If you want something which inmediatly can be understood, use Esperanto words. I myself was very much surprised how familar Esperanto words are in a broad range of languages and how nice it sounds and how easy it is to invent new words with a useful meaning (I got inspired by the "Serchilo" project and did name my own "Pakanto").

"Full ACK! Though I usually like innovative names like Amarok - this is really a bit too much. It's just too geeky to be taken seriously."

Take a quick look around the Internet, and you'll find a lot of websites with a respectable amount of traffic that get it from offering hot, free or cool new spywar^Wstuff to a market that is decidedly non-geeky. It's a snappy name that's understandable to anyone who speaks english, and I'm sure the name can be changed for other localities.

Now if they'd have given it a recursive acronym like "GHS Hot Stuff" or similiar, that would be geeky.

I wish people would stop trying to get market speech everywhere. Fuck, you even needed to put in the word "market" in your proposal. It doesn't make the product more professional, it just makes it seem like an advertisement. What's not to cringe about then?

Look, KDE isn't produced by or for marketers. It's free. Why should it try to emulate the business world?

At some point this will have to incorporate full-blown package management features, namely tracking and resolving dependencies and allowing for manual and automatic updates of installed packages. Dependencies actually come in three forms: 1) the version of the host program (e.g. Amarok) 2) other installed packages from the GHNS system and 3) dependencies on the host system (e.g. some python library). Admittedly that makes the problem a bit tricky, but IMHO that is not a good reason to force the end user to solve it.

Today the developer of a GHNS package, and the user, have to work around the fact that the system does not handle dependencies internally. One way this is done today (by developers) is by making monolithic bundles of parts that would actually be more logical to package separately (e.g the Lyriki-Lyrics family of scripts for Amarok). Still, there is quite a bit of guesswork required on the part of the user and there is no guarantee that an installed package will work.

What plans are there to add such capabilities to the system? Could that make it already into the second generation system? My hunch is that rather than going for a home-grown partial solution, one might just as well rip the logic from a proven code base such as Debian's apt?

For some applications it would be great if there was "Boring Old Stuff" packaged with the software. think of Ktouch. I makes a horrible impression to first time users when there are not example lessons for the software shipped with the program.

Great work!
man, this offers really cool possibilities!
Imagine, how important this feature could become in KOffice for the end-user: he can obtain content right at the time when he needs it! Not only Kword-templates as mentioned (one of the biggest shortcoming in office-suits I know is the lack of good templates eg for busines-letters, etc.), but also cliparts, even fonts, spreadsheets solving certain issues etc. and maybe also whole KDE-desktop-themes!
But the whole thing should work upstream as well! It should be easy for users to share the contend they created. Maybe Karbon14 could have a menue-button labelled 'donate to Open-Clipart' which would result in an automatic upload of the present image and availibility over Kgetnewhotstuff. (I think low-quality-content could easily be eliminated using the rating-system)
In the same way, every application capable of creating distributable content could provide a simple way to share documents with one click (or wizzard guided...). 'share current desktop-theme' in KDE-settings, 'share current template' in kWord, and so on.
This would result in a huge collaborating comunity!